Innovation and investment are keys to success for businesses, for economies and for West Virginia, the chairman and CEO of the one of the world's largest defense contractors told Charleston business leaders Tuesday night.
Wes Bush, a Morgantown native, runs Northrop Grumman, an aerospace and defense company that makes planes, drones, radar, missile systems and dozens of other technologies for the U.S. government and others.
Bush spoke at the Charleston Area Alliance's annual celebration, held at the McLaughlin Air National Guard Base in Charleston.
Innovation based economies are those that are able to bring people together, create an environment where new ideas can flourish and then establish partnerships to maintain that environment, Bush said.
"I see that potential in great magnitude right here in the great state of West Virginia," said Bush, who has run Northrop Grumman since 2010. "It is especially imperative that business leaders come together to make these things happen."
He said that West Virginia has made "fabulous investments in its transportation and telecommunications infrastructure," although that might come as a surprise to people whose cars are suffering from potholed roads and whose rural homes can't find broadband.
He touted West Virginia's universities and its "superb human capital base."
"Today these assets are generating human capacity that largely leaves the state," he said. "We need West Virginia to transition to a net importer of talent."
Bush didn't mention West Virginia's struggling coal industry, but the inference was hard to miss at times.
"Those states that focus exclusively on a single component of the global economic situation will be far more vulnerable to unpredictive economic winds than the more diversified innovation based economies," he said.
He cited a couple examples of areas that set up the environment for such economies and then had the patience, over decades, to see them blossom.
In the 1950s, a Stanford professor convinced the university to lease some of its land for an office park for new technologies companies, Bush said.
And Stanford offered the leaders and employees of those companies the opportunity to pursue graduate degrees, part time.
Two of the very first tenants of the Stanford Industrial Park, in 1953, were two Stanford graduates named William Hewlett and David Packard.
A half century or so later, their company was among the largest technology companies in the world and the Stanford Industrial Park had become the hub of Silicon Valley.
"It was not God who ordained that Silicon Valley would be an innovation center," Bush said. "It did not happen overnight, it took determination and vision and years of focus to make it happen."
Bush talked about how his company chose to invest four years ago, despite stagnant or declining defense spending from the federal government. Analysts, he said, asked them what they were doing.
But the company's stock price is now booming, more than triple what it was in 2011.
"You have to invest ahead of the opportunity," Bush said. "Decline is a choice, it is not a fate."
Reach David Gutman
at david.gutman@wvgazettemail.com, 304-348-5119 or follow
@davidlgutmanon Twitter.